Kichae

It’s a lot harder to demand your government ID on a federated platform.

I have a lower-mid-end OnePlus. It is decidedly meh. It’s fine. It cost more than I wanted, has poor finger print reader placement, lacks induction charging, and never got the promised unlocked boot loaders, but it has the 3.5 mm headphone jack and microSD slot that I demanded from a phone.

It sure is a phone.

Oh, that’s actually the opposite of what the headline and article are talking about. It’s discussing how companies who have started using AI - that is, become the “habitualized user” - aren’t seeing any business benefits. Adding the real cost of use on top of that is going to make the decision a significant loss for these groups.

This is good enough for me. This means the Firefox code base will not get so integrated with AI features that forkers cannot remove them, and that was my primary concern.

Librewolf and Waterfox devs have both publicly said they wouldn’t be inclluding the AI stuff. Waiting on Floorp and Zen devs to weigh in still.

Well, with RAM prices already through the roof, and now SSD and GPU prices set to spike, I guess my plans for building a new desktop are out the window for the foreseeable future.

The thing is, they haven’t chosen not to decide, they’ve chosen to hide behind the rhetoric of not choosing. Substack chose the Nazis, fairly explicitly. And I’m sure Sequoia wouldn’t be neutral if the female COO had been making anti-Israel posts.

Weirdly enough, most companies collecting your data are actually really bad at doing so. Business people don’t prioritize data at all, and data collection is a total afterthought, often treated as a major inconvenience. It costs money, and they can’t charge for it.

The reason why there was no fallback is because that would have cost money to implement, and they can’t imagine someone wanting to use their product that way.

The only real work is my work. The only person who deserves a living wage is meeeeee!

It’s the slow but inevitable achievement of end-state of a system designed to re-frame and re-centralize power in the hands of the elite following the liberalization of political power.

This is its purpose. It always has been.

Because there is zero trust that this won’t be a one-sided liberalization, in favour of the fascists.

“We’re the front page of the Internet!”

“No, not like that…”

I bet door-to-door salespeople would make way more money if they could just break into your homes, leave their junk on your table, and steal your credit card, and yet we don’t let them do that.

Right. But when the bar is owned by a Nazi, your options for pushing them out of the bar becomes a lot more limited.

“Reviewers” need to understand that, unless they paid their own money, from a bog-standard store, on or after release day, they are not reviewers, they are hired spokespeople.

The reasons why the wealthy like liberalisation matters, though. The reasom the wralthy want more wealth matters.

Money is power. The wealthy are competing to have the most power. Eventually, that turns to taking control of the state. So, the wealthy will back free trade and deregulation right up until they, personally, are in a position to attempt a coup. After that, regulation and trade barriers work for the particular rich folk who have taken control over the state.

I think it’s dangerous to imagine people follow these folks, or let them run rampant over society, because they aspire to be like them. That makes it so much harder to really understand why people support them, or even just refuse to tell them “no”, and makes it impossible to do anything about it.

People believe that life is a meritocracy. Even when they themselves can look around at the people near them and see that those in positions of power don’t deserve it, they still view society as a whole as “fair”. Yes, they personally have may have gotten screwed over, but, in general, the people who float to the top got there because they were smarter and more capable. Therefore, we should sit back and just let them cook.

They need some kind of trigger to see the billionaires not as people who have earned their place, but who have stolen it.

There is no reason to even suggest that AI ‘means well’. It doesn’t mean anything, let alone well.

They don’t own it yet

Remember, boys and girls, Steam bringing its monopoly to Linux is a victory, but wanting literally any other closed source software is “pathetic”.

Yet another reminder that the worst thing about Linux is its users.